The Road to Google DMCA Hell is Paved with Good Intentions….

A year ago, in December of 2010, Kent Walker, General Counsel for Google, promised to make “copyright work better online.” According to his post on Google’s Public Policy website Walker assured copyright holders:

We’ll act on reliable copyright takedown requests within 24 hours. We will build tools to improve the submission process to make it easier for rightsholders to submitDMCA takedown requests for Google products (starting with Blogger and web Search). And for copyright owners who use the tools responsibly, we’ll reduce our average response time to 24 hours or less.

Well, as well all know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. This afternoon in my email I received responses to 3 DMCA notices I’d sent to Google regarding ads which appeared on pirate websites aside download links to my film. It’s nice to get a response, but there’s only one problem. Today’s emails were in response to DMCA notices I sent to Google last March–March 31st to be exact. Today is December 7th, 2011,by my count that’s more than 8 months (or approximately 5,928 hours) later– just a tad longer than Mr. Walker’s promise of 24. Oh well, better luck next time, eh?